skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course not. Society is driven by the frivolous more than the things that will advance us as a culture or species. Modern society is pathetic and has forgotten how to chase dreams.

Or rather, their dreams are no longer grand and hard things, but weak things like becoming rich so that one can simply party it up.

edit: and obviously there are a still some who dream big, I'm talking about my impression of the average attitude out there. I hope I'm wrong.
"Should you invent something that can be used for both good and [evil]?"

Don't worry about this. Literally every invention since fire falls into this category.

(Edited for content.)
I couldn't decide whether I downvoted you because of: sarcastic tone, disrespect of science, or ignorance about antidepressants.
Lincoln, Gandhi, anyone who has ever made good music.
WebGL around the net, 4 October 2012
S3 Now Supports Static Web Page Redirects
Once you read the story and see what your eyes see, rather than what your mind expects to see, you will be one step closer to enlightenment.

(Is there an emoticon for a terribly stern expression? Imagine it here.)
I used it a little bit back when I still wrote Python. It seemed a lot like HTML, but much terser, and whitespace-sensitive. ReST could do the same kind of stuff as HTML: build bullet lists, create tables, italic text, and so forth. However, since I had already learned HTML, learning another language that did the same thing felt like a waste of time. I fully believe that Restructured Text is a better markup language than HTML in some ways; however, I simply don't care because the differences are minor, and HTML is so much more powerful.

On the other hand, TeX was developed by Donald Knuth, a guy who spent his entire life doing research and writing papers about it. It has excellent math support, and is a true semantic language. I've written a few papers in TeX and been very happy with it.

Anyway, if RestructuredText were good at typesetting research papers, there would be no need for this project, would there?
Excellent answer (I hope you truly wrote that in 5 minutes haha). As someone who is currently dealing with depression due to too much stress (a stern warning to overworked start up founders out there), I am amazed at how little is known about the disease.
Given that is a theoretical question that you are attempting to fit into an actual algorithm to ostensibly solve a real problem, doesn't the actual performance of the algorithm matter? I can see that within the context of theory of computer science there may not be a difference between the speed of the two algorithms, since both are "asymptotically optimal" (a term I'm not sure I entirely grok), yet within virtually any defined set of random numbers less than infinity the algorithm I provided will perform substantially faster.

I suppose I'm at a loss for words, since as a seasoned software developer without a deep background in theoretical computer science, it seems that I am being told to disregard my intuition based on experience in favor of a theoretical model that seems to ignore actual problem sets. Am I missing something?
I never noticed the setting to show color "as authored" before. Normally, devtools converts RGB or HSL colors to hex, so you can't copy tweaks back to the source code. Leaving the color alone is how I'll have my devtools now.
US First Presidential Debate 2012 Full Highlights
The next LinkedIn : Curriculum Vitae made as a HTML5/WebGL game
Does VC (fund size) matter?
>>A civilization might do this either to hide from others

Why would they try to hide this from others? Are we trying to hide our satellites, or our probes that we are sending out?
Yep it was given at this year's Velocity Conference (which was great fun by the way, lots of cool presentations) http://velocityconf.com/velocity2012

Not seeing any aliasing here.
I got accept the first time, and didn't even have an official degree paper yet, since the ceremony was six months ahead of time. I just had transcripts and a letter from the school that I completed the requirements of my degree. It really is the mood of the officer. I had a really nice newbie mom type for my application.
No one has explained exactly what kind of problems would Quantum computer could solve well. From few articles I've read it is not for all kinds of tasks a magic ax.

if someone can expand on that, that would be great.
Any form of critique towards a biased source can always be countered with claims of it being an ad hominem argument...

Well, any critique which consists solely of personal attacks can be countered that way. It's super effective!
The Velocity 2012 videos are being added to the following page, the video to back the talk should be up in a day or three: http://velocityconf.com/velocityeu2012/public/schedule/proce...
RIP to one of the greatest innovators of our time.
>>Because they might attract the attention of greater beings.

As a life form we don't seem to be taking any precautions to 'hide' from others.

Why are assuming others would like to 'hide'?
WeedFS Scalable Distributed File System O(1) disk read, adds replication support
66 characters:

" ".join(i%3/2*"Fizz"+i%5/4*"Buzz"or str(i+1) for i in range(100))
Moped messaging service with foursquare integration
> I derived such a big part of my [...] identity from iOS

Get a life.
So is the Bob Moog doodle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4311004
A year already? Time flies, agreed.
Before everyone has a knee-jerk reaction to the title, read this paragraph from about 15% down:

----

Obviously, I am referring to the user experience and to the style of the content in this analysis; not to the technology used to serve up this content. Thus, what I call "articles" might be hosted on a weblog service. What matters is that the user experience is that of immersion in comprehensive treatment of a topic, as opposed to a blog-style linear sequence of short, frequent postings commenting on the hot topic of the day. It doesn't matter what software is used to host the content, the distinctions are:

* in-depth vs. superficial

* original/primary vs. derivative/secondary

* driven by the author's expertise vs. being reflectively driven by other sites or outside events
Interestingly enough some historians believe in the central premise of psycho-history, that the actions of a large group of people are inevitable. Ian Morris touches on it in "Why the West Rules - For Now"
Whoever designed this didn't test to see what happens when you click on third row. You can't click most of the windows on the third row because the only spot where you can close them (top right corner) is being covered.
Why People Pirate Movies: Reason #367
You have no idea why he says that, why must you be a complete asshole? He might be some sort of evangelist, or a guy who got some claim to fame through iOS or spends 10h/days working with or on it (the case seems to be the later). If what you do is part of your identity, the ecosystem you do it on also is.
subs = {3 => "Fizz", 5 => "Buzz", 7 => "Bazz"}
(1..100).map{|n| subs.keys.inject(nil) {|a,k| n % k == 0 ? (a||"")+subs[k] : a} || n.to_s}

Kind of boggles the mind sometimes to realize the crappy code people will write without thinking things through.
I've posted about this before- I live in South Africa. My domestic worker started playing Angry Birds last year with my then two-year old. It was a hook that got her into computers, something that intimidated her until then. She got a computer for her family back home. A door was opened that was until then shut.

Deciding what "matters" is a trickier than we think.
Any thoughts on why Apple didn't instrument Maps before i0S6 to track where a user searched for and where they ended up? You figure that when someone searches for a location, an hour later they're most likely to be either 1) where they were before (still at home/work), or 2) at the location.
An easy solution today would be to just restrict people based on what school they have in their FB profile ;-)
Windows Internals, Part 2, 6th Edition
Please keep your beloved war on drugs out of medical research and practice. Stop looking at just risk, ignoring potential benefit. Don't let sick people suffer because of recreational users.
People in many parts of the world still have insufficient access to painkillers because policy focuses on risks. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/bff76bf2-05a1-11e2-9ebd-00144...
It's easy to understand that dying of cancer in agony is a bad thing. Yet, we allow the same thing to happen to people suffering from mental illnesses.
There was very promising scientific research on LSD for psychotherapy in the sixties, but that was set back for decades and never recovered because someone didn't like hippies tripping on (much, much higher doses of) it. I very much hope that the same thing doesn't happen to Ketamine research.
PyInstaller can bundle everything in the exe itself, not sure about py2exe.
I'd like to see better template error messages.
That it is, but I find it hard to imagine people doing this day after day without any inkling that what they're doing is somehow wrong.
I host ~25 low traffic websites & have some questions about moving to AWS
I've been using shared hosting, dedicated servers & dedicated virtual servers with pretty straight forward pricing for years now, but after just hating the service, UI & reliability most of the services i've come across (godaddy, 1&1, network solutions, dreamhost, etc) and then recently running into an issue with MediaTemple not allowing adult sites (i host 2 adult sites)... AWS seems to be my final frontier of hosting.

So, since I want to put all my sites on 1 server (they're mostly side projects & a few clients sites) to make my life easier... What does HN suggest when using AWS?

~20 of the sites average 10-50 hits a day

~5 of the sites average 100-300 hits a day

About once a month, when mentioned by a blog or new marketing comes out, 2 or 3 of the sites will hit 1000 hits a day for a day or two and then go back down to their regular traffic sizes.

~5 are Magento stores

~15 are WordPress sites

~5 are static html sites with just a few pages

All but 1 of the Magento stores are actually just Magento sites being worked on, and wont live on the server for more than few months time. However there will always be at least this many on the box as i work on more stores.

My questions:

1. What service is right for me? EC2?

2. Is AWS just total overkill?

3. If AWS is a good idea, what size instance/server/service should i use?

4. What kind of prices am I looking at?

I would love to pay no more than 100/month if at all possible, but obviously if I need to I'm open to paying more. I am a firm believer in you get what you pay for. If better hosting costs more, than so be it.
Chronic use of tourniquets destroys healthy tissue.
Angry birds falls under none of the criticisms people make of zynga's output. It's a honest-to-goodness, (relatively) original and fun game. People play it because they like it, not simply because they need the dopamine hit.
I am not an expert, but as i can see, when they first started from Harvard in 2004, they restricted the access to only @harvard,edu address (must have had some sort of Java script validation to check and allow only that domain)and later when they expanded to diff universities the same validations must have been modified.
Has there ever been another story (besides Jobs's death) that took over the front page of HN?
100% sure. I've seen the source code for trident via shared source a few years ago.

Its well written and fairly modular. It has COM/IDL bindings but the core is very clean. I'd say it was better written than chrome.

It also used to run on Unix!
>This brings up another interesting hypothesis: dark matter is actually the computronium of all of the alien civilizations in the universe that have achieved a technological singularity.

Technological singularity describes the aftermath as an entity achieves an intelligence significantly superior to that of the average unaided human mind. The term gets thrown at a lot of things that don't seem to have anything to do with it. In this case I don't see why humans level intelligence is not enough to build a Dyson Sphere.
So native english speakers avoid "ummm", but english learners should actually make it a habit. Likewise, when learning a foreign language, native english speakers should make a habit of adopting that language's filler words. Especially because you will be using it so often while trying to remember vocabularly.

For example, if you are learning spanish, use drawn out "pues" or "este..." to interject your broken spanish and you will insantly sound more fluent. Not "ummmm" which sticks out like a sore thumb to native spanish speakers. Chinese speakers learning english will sound better using "ummm" instead of "aaaahhhh". And german speakers instead of "zee...". I'm not sure how to phoneticize the Indian filler sound (anyone? :)

Point is, as a foreign learner, the quicker you can adopt the native filler the better you will sound, because you will be using it quite often.
Most startups are expensive hobbies
We were global before Netflix was in Canada, so they inherited it from us!
Back around the Instagram acquisition when HN went are-we-in-a-bubble-centric for a while, an opinion I read a few times is that you shouldn't be worrying about the bubble popping when everyone's talking about it, but rather when everyone stops.

Kind of a baseless argument, really. Still, has much changed? Isn't VC money still sloshing around the valley? Aren't startups starting up in ridiculous numbers? Isn't everyone and their dog an angel investor? That was my impression of where things were heading before stories about it dropped off in regularity. Even up here at the University of Calgary this year I've seen ads asking for talent to join startups, which is a first as far as I've noticed.
i genuinely believe that the efforts and work that Late Steve Jobs did, brought a revolution in that industry and touched the hearts of millions and millions of people. and i believe this is the reason y we all cant ignore the fact of his greatness
Generating original project names that sound good
bad timing - but who could have known...
If you need a list to remember things. A list is fine.
If you need a list to schedule your life. A list is not fine.
Got the same here: http://pinboard.in/u:sachitgupta/t:stevejobs 90+ articles bookmarked if anyone wants to check them out.
Revel is the way to "go"...
Can someone explain in simple English what a "writedown" means?
Casper Typeface (free font)
It could very well be that the only civilizations that still exist are the ones that are good at hiding. All the others (even if they are the big majority) might have been destroyed after giving a signal of life/existence.
Removals Sydenham Hill SE21, SE26
that doodle stopped all people in our office doing work for about 2 hours...
Codeacademy Releases Free Ruby Development Courses
Easy, the company that is depending on me is not physically there, watching and judging me. Sure they probably are watching and judging me, but as long they're not physically present that makes all the difference to my mind...
See also Russ Cox's "Zip Files All The Way Down" article:

http://research.swtch.com/zip
Here's a screenshot I took of the Apple home page as well: http://i.imgur.com/xrO47.png

And from Amazon: http://imgur.com/eJ77c (upper right corner)
yeah, but it's easier politically to rewrite it in a newer language. If you rewrite it in the same language, then you have to explain your rewrite as cleaning up someone's braindead mistakes-- someone who might still work there.

If you rewrite it in a different language, then you get to blame the old language and framework for all the problems. No harm, no foul-- and you get to put the new shiny thing on your resume.
Sure. It's a hack. I get it. Hacks are cool. But this is a hack which has been posted a million times over and over the last few months.

At some point the novelty wears off and IMO this one is way past due.

Apart from that, I was asking if there was anything else I was missing. From the responses I got, it seems the answer is "no".
The jury is still out on this one. Unless you can show some numbers, it's hard to see this as anything but a subjective extrapolation of the facts.

Nonetheless, Sift Science's claim is at best poorly worded because it gives armor to the false and unfair interpretation that the majority of regular Nigerians folks are fraudulent, which by itself begs the question.
How about a meta-answer?

"I am really passionate about an interview question, which I like to call the most revealing job interview question.

It’s without a doubt my favorite interview question, because it only take 5 minutes and tells me a remarkable amount about candidates. Even though it’s not a technical question per se, I still give it to every programmer I interview.

[...]

For senior positions, I will ask a question early in the 5 minutes that is a complete tangent and has little to do with their goal. A star candidate will politely refuse to go down this rat hole and insist that we stay on topic. This seems unfair since an they’re in an interview and just doing what they’re being asked. In reality though, the very same thing happens often in real work. Even mangers do not innately know what is most important about a topic, and it’s key to have confident people on the team that add focus to conversations."
Ketamine has been known to be "psychologically dependent" with heavy use - I guess the real world might seem a bit dull for some after all the crazy things that happen in the K-hole. But very heavy users can also experience extreme bladder damage, as their tolerance and dosage rise.

It's fascinating to see these demonised recreational drugs being researched finally for their beneficial side-effects, sometimes in very small doses. Another one that comes to mind is the reported use of sub-psychoactive doses of LSD to combat the horror of cluster headaches.
This is exactly what I've been looking for - I'm really interested in helping a friend make some of his slow sites fast, and making some of my own sites even faster. There's so much I didn't understand about the page render process and this helps massively!
The major benefits were persistant connections and background fetching of data - a lot of my requests serve data directly from local memory instead of hitting local or shared caches and databases.

The equivalent in .NET I guess would be BackgroundWorkers that are independently prefetching the data required most of the time but I could never get them to Just Work.

Specifically for my use case 99+ percent of requests receive some data, do some light manipulations and then push the data to redis about 8,000 to 12,000 times a second. With .NET I could only push to locally running software instances because anything remote couldn't keep up with the connection volume (without throwing even more hardware at the problem).
Great article. The title is a bit misleading though. I thought this was sort of a counter-argument to the 'programmers cannot program', but introduces monoids right at the end.

Anyway, FizzBuzz and the like are the kinds of questions you would probably ask to a new graduate because frankly, there is nothing else to ask from them. They have no related experience for the most part.

For experienced ones, the way our company (http://aelogica.com) identifies good candidates is via a day of pair-programming. Technical knowledge is just part of the package, and any kind of problem solving will not address that.
Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey wrote a book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...) where he explains how aerobic exercise (esp high-intensity interval training/sprints) stimulates neurogenesis and balances the neurotransmitters in the brain. He shows exercise can be more effective than drugs for the treatment of anxiety, stress, depression, and ADHD.
> I have never seen the movie

You should fix that.

In addition, the bomb in question was the result of an ill-
conceived Doomsday device to prevent the use of bombs.

In other words, this title suggests that as part of a policy of mutually assured destruction, Microsoft created a device to unleash COM if it ever sensed it was being attacked. They just forgot to tell anyone about the device (why didn't you tell the world!?!) and now we are all living with the fallout.
I obviously only skimmed the article then proceeded to make fun of it. It's fairly obvious to me though that ketamine makes people less depressed temporarily is a non-story and the article is overselling the importance of the research. I forget that my world class sarcasm is unappreciated here though!
You had to have an e-mail address from a University at the time. There probably isn't anything more robust for checking if you're enrolled at a certain University than having to click a link sent to your University e-mail.
Why not just use Bukkit? Even single player is running a server internally now, it is easy to just run craftbukkit as an instance, plus if people want to change it they can just write plugins.

All you really need now is an API for sending custom packets to and from the client.
> This is a great post for validating management concerns about pulling in sexy new technologies for the hell of it.

But their old technology is requiring towers with 36GB of RAM. It seems like more of a choice between the devil you know vs the devil you don't. Obviously there needs to be a cost-benefit analysis even if it's imperfect. Otherwise you'll get stuck in a local maxima and before you know it you're paying $10 per million cycles of a mainframe running batch COBOL jobs maintained by old men who are dying faster than you can replace them.
agreed. If people can't understand bitcoin in at least some basic way they will not use it. Faq's on bitcoin are full of questions which nobody has ever asked. Even bitcoin enthusiasts can't explain bitcoin, because they don't understand it either. constantly changing account/addresses? i don't like it, would rather one account and have payments tagged with sender info. i still have not managed to find out if bitcoin supports this. can't make sense of messaging aspect, labeling, verification , don't understand mining. Ordinary folks will not buy into this if it can not be explained in two short sentences, no matter how logical or robust or brilliant bitcoin might be.
That would be a very useful reply. It would effectively communicate to me whether you would make a good hire.
While this is out of the range of most consumers, I wonder if any bored sysadmins with a new storage system to test have tried unzipping that file...
About time they started looking for Dyson Spheres!
I included an extra bit of improvement to deal with inflation rates.
Patched ruby 1.9.3-p194 for 30% faster rails boot
Seems to be some bugs... for example when I filter by 'selling data,' the only company that pops up is LinkedIn, but when I click on Google Docs, it says they make money in part by selling data. Cool concept though!